The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Associate Professor Victoria Stodden a two-year, $300,000 grant to facilitate research on scientific reproducibility. Her project, "Reproducibility and Cyberinfrastructure for Computational and Data-Enabled Science," seeks to improve understanding of how the scientific community can adapt to the increasing use of computing and large-scale data resources. Michela Taufer, the Jack Dongarra Professor in High Performance Computing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will serve as co-principal investigator on the project, which is funded by an NSF Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER).
According to Stodden, the project will assess the implications of recommendations made in a 2019 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report on reproducibility and replication in science.
"For our project, we will employ diverse scientific use cases chosen to cover different ways researchers interact with computational infrastructure," Stodden said. "Formalisms will also be applied to the use cases to articulate the role of computational infrastructure in enabling transparency and reproducibility, and to elucidate how computational infrastructure can conform to the NASEM report recommendations. The overall aim is to articulate avenues for future research at the intersection of transparency, reproducibility, and computational infrastructure that supports scientific discovery."
Stodden is a leading figure in the area of reproducibility in computational science, exploring how we can better ensure the reliability and usefulness of scientific results in the face of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches to research. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science, the NAS Roundtable on Data Science Postsecondary Education, the National Academy of Engineering Online Ethics Center Advisory Group, National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS), and member-at-large of the Statistics section of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
At Illinois, Stodden holds faculty affiliate appointments in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Coordinated Science Lab, College of Law, Department of Statistics, and Department of Computer Science. She earned both her PhD in statistics and her law degree from Stanford University.